Volunteering
Alan Foster is developing a Reddit bot for mental health subreddits such as r/RaisedByNarcissists and r/SuicideWatch to address the critical issue of unanswered posts. Currently, up to 60% of new posts in r/SuicideWatch remain unanswered after 60 minutes, leaving vulnerable users without timely support. The proposed solution, named Hestia Mental Health, aims to deploy a bot that responds to posts within the first 5 minutes of posting, offering immediate assistance and support. The expected outcome is an estimated 1,460 lives saved per year at a cost of approximately $16 per life.
During r/RedditMeetupWeek, which took place from June 8 to 15, 2024, Alan Foster organized a community livestream event for the subreddit r/NFT. The event featured 3-5 community experts who shared their knowledge through 15-minute presentations. Topics included NFT design, marketing, investing, technology, and community building.
Alan actively manages a Google Document containing a master template of Reddit AutoMod RegEx rules. With over 25 rules totaling 35 pages of text, it’s one of the largest maintained collection of template rules that can be applied to any subreddit. A detailed index at the top of the rule list allows users to CTRL+F search for specific rules to quickly navigate the document.
In July of 2020 during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Alan posted a community poll to learn more about the Reddit Moderator community. He collected basic demographic information such as age range, gender, nationality, and opinions on how the website should be improved and general moderation best practices. A video was posted showcasing the data results in charts, and included a link to the dataset with instructions on how users could do their own data analysis using pivot tables.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Alan become more active as a community moderator and began joining subreddits to help moderate. His first subreddit was r/GPT3, an artificial intelligence subreddit, and he quickly joined many others to help manage their AutoModerator configurations and remove spam. Alan is now a moderator of over 20 communities including r/Mindfulness, r/NFT and r/Vegetarian.
Alan became the City Organizer of Boston for Meetup.com, a platform evangelist position responsible for supporting event organizers in the Greater Boston Area with resources and information to support the growth and success of their events. He leveraged his knowledge gained from attending an average of 5-8 events per week to answer questions that new organizers had about event planning and management.
Alan participated in the 2016 Reality Virtually hackathon and joined the volunteer team to help organize in 2017 and 2018. He acted as the equipment manager both years, keeping track of over 100 different VR and AR devices each year collectively worth more than $200,000.
Alan was first introduced to the Venture Cafe Foundation during late 2016 when he began traveling to Boston to attend events and network with others. He would frequently attend Venture Cafe Thursdays, free events every Thursday that lasted from 3-8pm and frequently had more than 500 attendees. Alan decided to join as an event organizer and helped support attendees during check-in and event room setup.
Alan is an organizer of the Boston EdTech Meetup Group. The Boston EdTech Meetup Group is a monthly event that supports educators, technologists, researchers, librarians, entrepreneurs, investors, reformers and learners looking to explore, discuss and improve technology in academia, K-12 education, higher education, and the private sector. They have 5+ active volunteers and over 4000 registered members.
BostonVR is a public meetup group that hosts monthly events discussing recent events in the VR, AR and MR industries. Alan began attending BostonVR Meetup events in 2016, and in 2017 he joined the organizers as an event coordinator for the Monthly VR Hack Days, full-day events where developers could work together and playtest new games or development builds with others.